Hermiston Council Approves a 15-year Tax Break for Lamb Weston

A planned USD220 million expansion of Lamb Weston’s French fry making operation in Hermiston, Oregon, USA, will come with a 15-year property tax break.

The Hermiston city council voted unanimously to offer its first Long Term Rural Enterprise Zone Agreement. The 15-year agreement offered to Lamb Weston includes payments in lieu of property taxes that will equal about 42% of what the company would have paid in property taxes.

Those payments will total USD1m per year for 15 years, split evenly between the city of Hermiston and Umatilla County.

Assistant city manager Mark Morgan said the city had to work hard to compete with Boardman, Patterson and other regional Lamb Weston facilities for the expansion, which is expected to bring in at least 140 new jobs.

“It’s safe to say this investment would not occur without the approval of this agreement,” Morgan said, according to eastoregonian.com.

Morgan said the city and county plan to work together to use the USD1m per year from Lamb Weston to invest in a water infrastructure project designed to spur increased housing development in Hermiston, which should in turn create even more jobs in Hermiston as workers previously living in the Tri-Cities instead pay for things like car insurance or doctors’ visits locally. He cited a study done by Washington State University estimating that for every job created in the potato processing industry, 5.4 more jobs are created in the area indirectly.